A Gladiator Dies Only Once (15 page)

Cicero did not mention the cube and cone, I noticed. They had been removed along with the thicket, lest someone else meet Agathinus’s fate.

Cicero cleared his throat and resumed dictating. “Ironic, brother Quintus, is it not, and sadly indicative of the degraded cultural standards of these modern Syracusans, that it took a Roman from Arpinum to rediscover for them the tomb of the keenest intellect who ever lived among them?”

Ironic indeed, I thought.

DEATH BY EROS

“The Neapolitans are different from us Romans,” I remarked to Eco as we strolled across the central forum of Neapolis. “A man can almost feel that he’s left Italy altogether and been magically transported to a seaport in Greece. Greek colonists founded the city hundreds of years ago, taking advantage of the extraordinary bay, which they called the
Krater,
or Cup. The locals still have Greek names, eat Greek food, follow Greek customs. Many of them don’t even speak Latin.”

Eco pointed to his lips and made a self-deprecating gesture to say,
Neither do I!
At fifteen, he tended to make a joke of everything, including his muteness.

“Ah, but you can
hear
Latin,” I said, flicking a finger against one of his ears just hard enough to sting, “and sometimes even understand it.”

We had arrived in Neapolis on our way back to Rome, after doing a bit of business for Cicero down in Sicily. Rather than stay at an inn, I was hoping to find accommodations with a wealthy Greek trader named Sosistrides. “The fellow owes me a favor,” Cicero had told me. “Look him up and mention my name, and I’m sure he’ll put you up for the night.”

With a few directions from the locals (who were polite enough not to laugh at my Greek) we found the trader’s house. The columns and lintels and decorative details of the facade were stained in various shades of pale red, blue, and yellow that seemed to glow under the warm sunlight. Incongruous amid the play of colors was a black wreath on the door.

“What do you think, Eco? Can we ask a friend of a friend, a total stranger really, to put us up when the household is in mourning? It seems presumptuous.”

Eco nodded thoughtfully, then gestured to the wreath and expressed curiosity with a flourish of his wrist. I nodded. “I see your point. If it’s Sosistrides who’s died, or a member of the family, Cicero would want us to deliver his condolences, wouldn’t he? And we must learn the details, so that we can inform him in a letter. I think we must at least rouse the doorkeeper, to see what’s happened.”

I walked to the door and politely knocked with the side of my foot. There was no answer. I knocked again and waited. I was about to rap on the door with my knuckles, rudely or not, when it swung open.

The man who stared back at us was dressed in mourning black. He was not a slave; I glanced at his hand and saw a citizen’s iron ring. His graying hair was disheveled and his face distressed. His eyes were red from weeping.

“What do you want?” he said, in a voice more wary than unkind.

“Forgive me, citizen. My name is Gordianus. This is my son, Eco. Eco hears but is mute, so I shall speak for him. We’re travelers, on our way home to Rome. I’m a friend of Marcus Tullius Cicero. It was he who—”

“Cicero? Ah, yes, the Roman administrator down in Sicily, the one who can actually read and write, for a change.” The man wrinkled his brow. “Has he sent a message, or . . .?”

“Nothing urgent; Cicero asked me only to remind you of his friendship. You are, I take it, the master of the house, Sosistrides?”

“Yes. And you? I’m sorry, did you already introduce yourself? My mind wanders . . .” He looked over his shoulder. Beyond him, in the vestibule, I glimpsed a funeral bier strewn with freshly cut flowers and laurel leaves.

“My name is Gordianus. And this is my son—”

“Gordianus, did you say?”

“Yes.”

“Cicero mentioned you once. Something about a murder trial up in Rome. You helped him. They call you the Finder.”

“Yes.”

He looked at me intently for a long moment. “Come in, Finder. I want you to see him.”

The bier in the vestibule was propped up and tilted at an angle so that its occupant could be clearly seen. The corpse was that of a youth probably not much older than Eco. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was clothed in a long white gown, so that only his face and hands were exposed. His hair was boyishly long and as yellow as a field of millet in summer, crowned with a laurel wreath of the sort awarded to athletic champions. The flesh of his delicately molded features was waxy and pale, but even in death his beauty was remarkable.

“His eyes were blue,” said Sosistrides in a low voice. “They’re closed now, you can’t see them, but they were blue, like his dear, dead mother’s; he got his looks from her. The purest blue you ever saw, like the color of the Cup on a clear day. When we pulled him from the pool, they were all bloodshot. . .”

“This is your son, Sosistrides?”

He stifled a sob. “My only son, Cleon.”

“A terrible loss.”

He nodded, unable to speak. Eco shifted nervously from foot to foot, studying the dead boy with furtive glances, almost shyly.

“They call you Finder,” Sosistrides finally said, in a hoarse voice. “Help me find the monster who killed my son.”

I looked at the dead youth and felt a deep empathy for Sosistrides’s suffering, and not merely because I myself had a son of similar age. (Eco may be adopted, but I love him as my own flesh.) I was stirred also by the loss of such beauty. Why does the death of a beautiful stranger affect us more deeply than the loss of someone plain? Why should it be so, that if a vase of exquisite workmanship but little practical value should break, we feel the loss more sharply than if we break an ugly vessel we use every day? The gods made men to love beauty above all else, perhaps because they themselves are beautiful, and wish for us to love them, even when they do us harm.

“How did he die, Sosistrides?”

“It was at the gymnasium, yesterday. There was a citywide contest among the boys—discus-throwing, wrestling, racing. I couldn’t attend. I was away in Pompeii on business all day . . .” Sosistrides again fought back tears. He reached out and touched the wreath on his son’s brow. “Cleon took the laurel crown. He was a splendid athlete. He always won at everything, but they say he outdid himself yesterday. If only I had been there to see it! Afterwards, while the other boys retired to the baths inside, Cleon took a swim in the long pool, alone. There was no one else in the courtyard. No one saw it happen . . .”

“The boy drowned, Sosistrides?” It seemed unlikely, if the boy had been as good at swimming as he was at everything else.

Sosistrides shook his head and shut his eyes tight, squeezing tears from them. “The gymnasiarchus is an old wrestler named Caputorus. It was he who found Cleon. He heard a splash, he said, but thought nothing of it. Later he went into the courtyard and discovered Cleon. The water was red with blood. Cleon was at the bottom of the pool. Beside him was a broken statue. It must have struck the back of his head; it left a terrible gash.”

“A statue?”

“Of Eros—the god you Romans call Cupid. A cherub with bow and arrows, a decoration at the edge of the pool. Not a large statue, but heavy, made of solid marble. It somehow fell from its pedestal as Cleon was passing below . . .” He gazed at the boy’s bloodless face, lost in misery.

I sensed the presence of another in the room, and turned to see a young woman in a black gown with a black mantle over her head. She walked to Sosistrides’s side. “Who are these visitors, father?”

“Friends of the provincial administrator down in Sicily—Gordianus of Rome, and his son, Eco. This is my daughter, Cleio. Daughter! Cover yourself!” Sosistrides’s sudden embarrassment was caused by the fact that Cleio had pushed the mantle from her head, revealing that her dark hair was crudely shorn, cut so short that it didn’t reach her shoulders. No longer shadowed by the mantle, her face, too, showed signs of unbridled mourning. Long scratches ran down her cheeks, and there were bruises where she appeared to have struck herself, marring a beauty that rivaled her brother’s.

“I mourn for the loss of the one I loved best in all the world,” she said in a hollow voice. “I feel no shame in showing it.” She cast an icy stare at me and at Eco, then swept from the room.

Extreme displays of grief are disdained in Rome, where excessive public mourning is banned by law, but we were in Neapolis. Sosistrides seemed to read my thoughts. “Cleio has always been more Greek than Roman. She lets her emotions run wild. Just the opposite of her brother. Cleon was always so cool, so detached.” He shook his head. “She’s taken her brother’s death very hard. When I came home from Pompeii yesterday I found his body here in the vestibule; his slaves had carried him home from the gymnasium. Cleio was in her room, crying uncontrollably. She’d already cut her hair. She wept and wailed all night long.”

He gazed at his dead son’s face and reached out to touch it, his hand looking warm and ruddy against the unnatural pallor of the boy’s cold cheek. “Someone murdered my son. You must help me find out who did it, Gordianus—to put the shade of my son to rest, and for my grieving daughter’s sake.”

“That’s right, I heard the splash. I was here behind my counter in the changing room, and the door to the courtyard was standing wide open, just like it is now.”

Caputorus the gymnasiarchus was a grizzled old wrestler with enormous shoulders, a perfectly bald head, and a protruding belly. His eyes kept darting past me to follow the comings and goings of the naked youths, and every so often he interrupted me in midsentence to yell out a greeting, which usually included some jocular insult or obscenity. The fourth time he reached out to tousle Eco’s hair, Eco deftly moved out of range and stayed there.

“And when you heard the splash, did you immediately go and have a look?” I asked.

“Not right away. To tell you the truth, I didn’t think much of it. I figured Cleon was out there jumping in and out of the pool, which is against the rules, mind you! It’s a long, shallow pool meant for swimming only, and no jumping allowed. But he was always breaking the rules. Thought he could get away with anything.”

“So why didn’t you go out and tell him to stop? You are the gymnasiarchus, aren’t you?”

“Do you think that counted for anything with that spoiled brat? Master of the gym I may be, but nobody was his master. You know what he’d have done? Quoted some fancy lines from some famous play, most likely about old wrestlers with big bellies, flashed his naked behind at me, and then jumped back in the pool! I don’t need the grief, thank you very much. Hey, Manius!” Caputorus shouted at a youth behind me. “I saw you and your sweetheart out there wrestling this morning. You been studying your old man’s dirty vases to learn those positions? Ha!”

Over my shoulder, I saw a redheaded youth flash a lascivious grin and make an obscene gesture using both hands.

“Back to yesterday,” I said. “You heard the splash and didn’t think much of it, but eventually you went out to the courtyard.”

“Just to get some fresh air. I noticed right away that Cleon wasn’t swimming anymore. I figured he’d headed inside to the baths.”

“But wouldn’t he have passed you on the way?”

“Not necessarily. There are two passageways into the courtyard. The one most people take goes past my counter here. The other is through a little hallway that connects to the outer vestibule. It’s a more roundabout route to get inside to the baths, but he could have gone in that way.”

“And could someone have gotten into the courtyard the same way?”

“Yes.”

“Then you can’t say for certain that Cleon was alone out there.”

“You are a sharp one, aren’t you!” Caputorus said sarcastically. “But you’re right. Cleon was out there by himself to start with, of that I’m sure. And after that, nobody walked by me, coming or going. But somebody could have come and gone by the other passageway. Anyway, when I stepped out there, I could tell right away that something was wrong, seriously wrong, though I couldn’t quite say what. Only later, I realized what it was: the statue was missing, that little statue of Eros that’s been there since before I took over running this place. You know how you can see a thing every day and take it for granted, and when all of a sudden it’s not there, you can’t even say what’s missing, but you
sense
that something’s off? That’s how it was. Then I saw the color of the water. All pinkish in one spot, and darker toward the bottom. I stepped closer and then I saw him, lying on the bottom, not moving and no air bubbles coming up, and the statue around him in pieces. It was obvious right away what must have happened. Here, I’ll show you the spot.”

As we were passing out the doorway, a muscular wrestler wearing only a leather headband and wrist-wraps squeezed by on his way in. Caputorus twisted a towel between his fists and snapped it against the youth’s bare backside. “Your mother!” yelled the stung athlete.

“No, your shiny red bottom!” Caputorus threw back his head and laughed.

The pool had been drained and scrubbed, leaving no trace of Cleon’s blood amid the puddles. The pieces of the statue of Eros had been gathered up and deposited next to the empty pedestal. One of the cherub’s tiny feet had broken off, as had the top of Eros’s bow, the point of his notched arrow, and the feathery tip of one wing.